


the sorrows of your changing face

by a_sinking_star



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Female Protagonist, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Poetry, Post-World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2015-05-08
Packaged: 2018-03-29 14:31:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3899764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_sinking_star/pseuds/a_sinking_star
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She often heard his voice in the last months of the war.  It wasn’t particularly distracting or concerning.  It was often quite useful: one didn’t become Captain America without a clever mind for strategy, after all.  But it is only once the war ends that the fantasies start.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sorrows of your changing face

It is raining when Margaret Carter returns to Bury St. Edmunds—a light, misting rain.

She has not been to Suffolk since the early years of her childhood, and although she finds she can understand the locals as well as she ever did, she’s vaguely aware that she’s now meant to be self-conscious of the plummy, posh tones of her accent. She doesn’t particularly care; she lost the ability to feel self-consciousness somewhere between her early graduation from finishing school and her wrangling her way into university.

Now that the war is over she is finally able to return and see that her birthplace has changed almost as much as she has. Not on the surface: bomb damage is minimal and the soaked green countryside is at first glance just as she remembers it, but there is a tension just beneath the surface now, a weariness in the eyes of the passersby, a shuttered look to all the whitewashed upright houses. _Love fled and paced upon the mountains overhead and hid his face amid a crowd of stars._

She is not there to stay. Her aunts and uncles and grandparents have all greyed and gentled with age; they smile and pat her hand and fix her tea with too much sugar. Her parents are sharp and domineering as ever. They settled in London when she was six and are already considering moving back now that the threat of bombings has passed. Everyone, at some point, asks her to move back to England and she shakes her head, a little regretful in spite of herself. She is restless, ill at ease within her own skin for the first time in her life.

It is a year of firsts for her: her first time viewing her hometown with adult eyes, her first time drinking too much and laughing too loudly with a man she does not care about, her first time wearing brown lipstick instead of red. Someone will photograph her soon, with her lips done up in an unobtrusive orange shade, and then there will be a highly publicized newspaper article conjecturing that her changed tastes in makeup reflect her mourning for her tragic unconsummated love, who stole her heart along with that of the whole nation. She will throw away the paper in disgust. She is not mourning him, after all; she is mourning all of them, all of the vain blustering men, the exhausted nurses and self-righteous volunteers who were her peers. Everyone limps home in pieces and she is no exception.

She’s almost too angry to grieve for him—he who was throwing himself onto grenades until the very end, but who was still selfish enough to make her listen. She hears his goodbyes in every greeting. Her anger cleanses even as it burns.

One day she catches sight of a man beneath the eaves of the church with his face turned away from her—cropped blonde hair, broad shoulders, nondescript brown coat. For a moment she tastes something like hope on her tongue. Then he turns, a stranger, and she feels something cold slither into her belly. _I seek in vain what lands to till or sow with seed_ , it whispers inside her. The next day, she makes plans for her return to New York.

She sees her dead cousins in every injured soldier, and Steve is everywhere.

…

_It is raining when Margaret Carter returns to the Stork Club—a light, misting rain._

_She is vibrant in red satin; her red-lipstick smile is a slash of blood against her pallor, too bright. But everything is bright; the club thrums with raised voices and golden lamplight. The air is full of smoke and laughter and perfume._

_And he is there, waiting for her. He can’t take his eyes off her. She wipes the rain from her skin and tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear and then her hand is in his and they are dancing and there is light, light everywhere._

…

She often heard his voice in the last months of the war. It wasn’t particularly distracting or concerning. It was often quite useful: one didn’t become Captain America without a clever mind for strategy, after all. But it is only once the war ends that the fantasies start. She unlocks the door to her flat and for a minute she can almost see him, pouring wine into a glass and offering it to her. It glitters like garnet and for a moment everything is vibrant and red. Everything starts and ends in red: she learned that when she drove an ambulance in London during the very early days of the war, when a terrified young woman birthed a wailing child in agony while another girl, younger still, bled out beside her from her war wounds, and her own hands clenched on the steering wheel.

 _We are the dead; short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow._ She wonders if that baby lived.

She wakes up in the middle of the night with the feel of his hands still on her skin.

In the mornings he is always gone and she is still there, unbearably light and achingly heavy all at once. _Thou knowest all; I sit and wait with blinded eyes and hands that fail_ , she thinks as she sits at her dressing table. _‘Til the last lifting of the veil and the first opening of the gate._ She’s never been a particularly religious person but she’s seen the wrath of God in a way that makes religious poetry ring true, as it never did before. She keeps his photograph propped against her mirror: he is squinting and vulnerable but there is something to the cut of his collarbone and the curl of his ear that hints at the icon an adoring public would make him, and there is something in his eyes that reflects the martyr he would make himself. I trust I shall not live in vain, I know that we shall meet again. She knows no such thing, of course, but she hopes. Oh God, she hopes.

The post-war SSR is fragile as a newborn, and she wants to put it through trial by fire and see it go up in flames rather than limp through this uneasy shifting thing everyone is so eager to call peace. _The land is black with briar and weed, nor cares for falling tears or rain._ There is no peace here. But there is always rain, and sometimes, when the downpour is so powerful it floods the streets, she thinks it might just be enough.

…

 _He is reading to her._ I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens; only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses. _His voice lulls and soothes._ Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.

_“It’s sickeningly sentimental, isn’t it?” she throws at him, but he only smirks. She has a soft spot for Cummings, and he knows it._

_His hands dip into the valley of her waist. He has the slim fingers of an artist, but their weight is tremendous and profound against her._

_She decided long ago that she disagrees with Cummings on this particular point. No one has smaller hands than the rain; the rain makes its way anywhere and everywhere._

_She feels his kiss against the hollow of her throat and her heart clenches as though around his fingertips. She can see herself coming around to Cummings’ point of view because he has touched her where the rain cannot reach._

…

In the summer, when the rain lessens, the nightmares become worse.

She dreams that she is at the bottom of the ocean, and everything is pale and cold and blue. There are searchlights cutting through the darkness above her and she hears the echoes of Howard Stark’s voice drifting through the leagues of frigid water that press down on her like the softest winter cloak. _I’ll find him…find him…find him…_ but however deep he goes it is not deep enough. She lies deeper still, drifting into the pearly light of ghosthood, her dark hair streaming around her milky swollen face like a banner, like a flag.

 _Ach, gerne möcht ich sie bei irgendwas Verlorenem im Dunkel unterbringen,_ she whispers as she drowns. _An einer fremden stillen Stelle, die nicht weiterschwingt, wenn deine Tiefen schwingen._

The war is over, she has new enemies to fight and new dragons to slay, and she is finally putting the German she perfected under the duress of wartime to some other use than interrogations. German drama is heavy and foreign but she likes the poetry, the push and pull of it. It keeps the nightmares at bay, at least during the daytime. She adds Rilke to her collection: Wilde, Thomas, Cummings, McCrae, Yeats and Rilke. They are the ones who can still speak to her. _Under the windings of the sea they lying long shall not die windily._

She would have married him in a heartbeat. How strange it is to think that, when she spent so much of her life fighting the very notion. _How many loved your moments of glad grace, and loved your beauty with love false or true, but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you._ She would have capitulated at once for him. She would have wandered, and she would always have come home.

…

_She stitches silk flowers out of decommissioned parachutes for their wedding day. She pins them to the lapel of her uniform—she has little else to wear—and into her hair and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, because he is here, breathing “my darling, my darling” into her skin, and her pulse snaps against his lips._

_She will love him, she will hold him, she will fight for him, she will worry about him, and one day, very far away, she will weep for him. But he is here now and they have all the time in the world._

…

It is on his death anniversary that she puts on red lipstick again. She slugs back black coffee, tugs and straightens her plum-colored skirt suit into submission as though it is a uniform. _Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; though lovers be lost love shall not; and death shall have no dominion._

He is not rising. She is rising for both of them, still breathing in grief and feeling it fill her lungs.

Brooklyn Bridge in the early morning: a fragile, incandescent moment. She weeps for him, all the tears she could not weep while the fighting raged on, or while the world struggled to rebuild.

_Bye...my darling._

**Author's Note:**

> The poems referenced within this piece are "Liebeslied" by Rainer Maria Rilke, "somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond" by E. E. Cummings, "The True Knowledge" by Oscar Wilde, "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" by Dylan Thomas, "When You Are Old" by William Butler Yeats, and "In Flanders Field" by John McCrae.
> 
> One of my favorite (but still not quite right) translations of the incorporated lines of "Liebeslied" is as follows: 
> 
> Oh gladly I would stow it [my soul] next to such  
> Things in the darkness as are never found  
> Down in an alien and silent space  
> That does not resonate when you resound.


End file.
